Sixty Metres of Weather

You hear it from the car park and you still aren’t ready for the width of it.

Skógafoss comes off what used to be the coastline — the sea has since moved five kilometres south and left this line of cliffs standing inland, with rivers falling off them all the way along. This is the biggest. Sixty metres, and wide enough that it lands as one continuous wall rather than a column, which is why there is so much water in the air in front of it.

That is the whole reason to walk in close. The spray comes off the plunge pool in a slow drift and travels a long way down the gravel, and on an afternoon like the one I had — cloudless, sun low enough behind me — it turns into a rainbow that closes. Not a fragment. Both feet on the ground, the whole arc, and it moves when you move, so you can walk it left and right along the black stones and it follows you like something on a track.

It isn’t a view. It’s a machine that runs whenever the sun is out.

I got soaked, which is unavoidable and worth it. There is a staircase up the side to the top of the falls — several hundred steps, and the path keeps going up the river past a whole chain of smaller ones. I did some of it, mostly to look back down: from up there the plain reads flat and green all the way to the sea, and the tour buses in the car park go small, and you understand what the cliff actually is.

Then back down to the camper, wet, with three more hours of driving east before dark.